Letters

Paul Taylor (Letters, LJ March 2001)
complains about SuSE 7.0 defaulting/reverting to a German keyboard.
I'm afraid he won't get any sympathy from those who don't live in
the US and have to put up with this type of behaviour from the
majority of products. The arrogance of US companies means that most
systems default to US dates, US keyboards, US spellings and US
measurements, often requiring considerable effort by users to
“fix” their machines for their own locale. Linux is particularly
poor in this area compared with, for example, Microsoft. At least
with a Windows OS, if the locale is set correctly on initial
install, it stays that way for all Microsoft applications and most
other third party applications (although Microsoft's idea of Metric
measurements has a strange US flavour—what is “A4 Letter”?). Not
so with Linux. I have often been caught out on Linux, particularly
with log files, because the dates are formatted wrongly. The Linux
crowd do care about the end user, as long as the end user is a
techie and an American. I would rewrite Paul's last sentence as: I
think the basic problem with most of the software development crowd
is that they don't give a rat's arse about the non-US end
user.

—Mark Easterbrook, Southampton, UK

Disturbing FX

I read the article “GFX: XFree and Video4Linux” (April
2001) by Mr. Rowe, and I must say, for the first time in my life,
an article in LJ really disturbed me.

Mr. Rowe presents himself as a person who hasn't followed
Linux from the beginning and doesn't know it, but having picked it
up he now dislikes it. He says that Xf86Config is “prehistoric”,
Xf86Setup is “not good enough” for him, pure text programs are
“dated applications”, dselect is
“primitive” and so on.

“Why our mouse wouldn't work was a mystery”, he says, and
he says also that some desktop managers “also include a window
manager, but desktop managers have a lot of other features”. It's
ridiculous: can one really come to LJ and
print such things?

It is clear that (after the X server) the window manager is
the first component you need to decore your screen, but obviously
enough, Mr. Rowe never tried twm, fvwm, olvwm and all the tiny
windows managers that can run on the i386 with 2MB of RAM and 60MB
of hard disk. Saying that Xf86Config is prehistoric indicated that
one must never have tried to tune manually the timing lines on
XF86Config, too.

—Franco Favento dei Favento da
Triestef.favento@ieee.org

Rowe replies: Franco, sorry
my article disturbed you. Thank you for writing to let me know. I
like Linux, but I still see things that need improvement. Many
involved in the development of Linux and Linux-based software share
this opinion. Otherwise, why the ongoing effort? The criticism that
bothered you wasn't really about Linux, was it? It was XFree86, a
GUI also used by FreeBSD and other operating systems. If we compare
the available configuration tools to editing modelines by hand,
then you are right that we should appreciate a great improvement.
If, on the other hand, we compare to configuration in Windows, Mac
and BeOS, then saying XFree86 is primitive is one of the kinder
things that may be said. Many users experience distress configuring
XFree86. In response to your question, I have used twm and olvm,
but have not tried fvwm. Back when my desktop was a Sun Sparc20 I
developed multimedia software running on OpenLook (that is, olvm).
Open-source software can be responsive to a cry for improvement.
And, what better place to point out what we should be thinking
about improving in Linux software than Linux Journal? My column is
not about moving to Windows (as you suggest), but about moving from
Windows to Linux. Thanks again for writing. I hope some of my
future articles may be more to your liking.

Simple Accents

This is about the keyboard question to get á or
ç (Best of Technical Support, April 2001). I think the
answers there were too complicated.

Just edit your XF86Config and make sure your keyboard section
does not have any “no dead keys” statements. Finally, pick
“en_US” instead of “us” which is the default. Now all those
trs intéressantes combinations will be
available using your dead key. It will work everywhere too, even on
consoles.

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